Folio Society Published Works Number 3252
Wilford, John Noble - The Mapmakers
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Wilford, John Noble - The Mapmakers (Published in by The Folio Society in 2016. Introduced by Simon Garfield. The definitive history of the pioneers of cartography, lavishly illustrated with 32 pages of colour plates. Who hasn't been fascinated by the names on a map, or stopped a spinning globe with their finger? Humans still long to discover what maps can tell us about ourselves, and the potential they hold to tell us about the rest of the universe. In a new introduction Simon Garfield, bestselling author of On the Map: Why the World Looks the Way it Does, describes The Mapmakers as a 'magisterial sweep of cartographic wonders', and speaks of the joy John Noble Wilford takes in these stories of discovery. Quarter-bound in cloth with Modigliani paper sides. Set in Haarlemmer with Avenir Book display. 512 pages. Frontispiece and 32 pages of colour plates. Printed endpapers. 10" x 6.25". In an age in which digital maps are accessible at the touch of a button, it is easy to forget our reliance on centuries of hard-won knowledge. We are, as Simon Garfield writes in his introduction to The Mapmakers, 'seldom lost, for good and for bad'. But it is to the curiosity of our ancestors that we owe our confident navigation of the world today. From the far-reaching wisdom of Ptolemy to Percival Lowell's survey of alien waterways on Mars, the cartographer's stories spring to life in this fascinating chronicle. The endpapers of this edition display two dazzling images of the Bosphorus: the first from the 'Peutinger Table', a Roman road map of the third century, and the second a 2012 satellite image of the same region. The binding shows a detail from Piri Reis's Book on Navigation, dating from around 1525. Among the illustrations is Bradford Washburn's map 'The Heart of the Grand Canyon', the result of an expedition that inspired the author to write this definitive history – a paean, as Garfield puts it, to 'the pure wonder of wander'. )
